Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI y anthropic. The company is launching a new large language model called Mistral Large. It is designed to rival other top-tier models in reasoning capabilities, such as GPT-4 and Claude 2.
In addition to Mistral Large, the startup is also launching its own alternative to ChatGPT with a new service called The Chat. This chat assistant is currently available in beta.
The company Mistral AI, the company is best known for its cap table as it raised an obscene amount of money in a very short time to develop the fundamental AI models. The company was officially incorporated in May 2023. Just a few weeks later, Mistral AI raised a $112 million seed round. In December, the company closed a $415 million funding round with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leading the round.
Founded by alumni of Google's DeepMind and Meta, Mistral AI was originally positioned as an artificial intelligence company with an open source approach. While Mistral AI's first model was released under an open source license with model access, that is not the case for its larger models.
Mistral AI's business model is increasingly similar to OpenAI's business model, as the company offers Mistral Large through a usage-based payment API. It currently costs $8 per million tokens in and $24 per million tokens out to check out Mistral Large. In artificial language jargon, tokens represent small fragments of words; For example, the word “FinTech” will be split into two tokens, “Fin” and “Tech,” when processed by an AI model.
By default, Mistral AI supports contextual windows of 32.000 tokens (typically more than 20.000 words). Mistral Large supports English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.
For comparison, GPT-4 with a 32k token context window currently costs $60 per million input tokens and $120 per million output tokens. Therefore, Mistral Large is currently 5 to 7,5 times cheaper than GPT-4-32k. Things are changing at a rapid pace and companies Artificial Intelligence They update their prices periodically.
But how does Mistral Large compare to GPT-4 and Claude 2? As always, it is very difficult to know. Mistral AI claims to be second only to GPT-4 based on various benchmarks. But there could be some benchmark selections and disparities in real-life usage. Test results must be analyzed
Image: Mistral AI
An alternative to ChatGPT
Mistral AI also launches a chat assistant called Le Chat. Anyone can sign up and try it out at chat.mistral.ai. The company says that for now it is a beta version and that there could be “quirks.”
Access to the service is free, for now, and users can choose between three different models: Mistral Small, Mistral Large and a prototype model designed to be short and concise called Mistral Next. It's also worth noting that Le Chat can't access the web when you use it.
The company also plans to launch a paid version of Le Chat for enterprise customers. In addition to central billing, enterprise customers will be able to define moderation mechanisms.
A partnership with Microsoft
Finally, Mistral AI also announces a partnership with Microsoft. In addition to Mistral's own API platform, Microsoft is going to provide Mistral models to your Azure customers.
It's just another model from the Azure catalog, which doesn't seem like a big deal. And yet, it also means that Mistral AI and Microsoft are now having conversations about opportunities to collaborate and potentially go further. The first benefit of that partnership is that Mistral AI will likely attract more customers with this new distribution channel.
As for Microsoft, the company is the main investor in the OpenAI subsidiary. But it has also welcomed other AI models on its cloud computing platform. For example, Microsoft and Meta they associated to deliver large Llama language models in Azure.
This open partnership strategy is a good way to keep Azure customers in your product ecosystem. It also helps when it comes to taking action against the competition.
